


The Only

by pasdecoeur



Series: superbat works [9]
Category: DCU
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, banging on all my pots and drums, it's just me sitting alone in this room, not shutting up about how superbat is fundamentally a tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:33:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25712137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pasdecoeur/pseuds/pasdecoeur
Summary: He's doing okay, all things considered.But some days are harder than others.
Relationships: Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne
Series: superbat works [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1270769
Comments: 46
Kudos: 180





	The Only

**Author's Note:**

> the title is from sasha sloan's the only, which you should one HUNDY listen to while reading this. **[youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_44-5ENF2AI)** | **[spotify](https://open.spotify.com/album/2oMZSDIcBFvhqoVsByTfvb)** | **[soundcloud](https://soundcloud.com/sasha-sloan/the-only)**

He woke up with the sunrise. Well, alright no. He woke up with an alarm that went off at sunrise, which he liked to think off as mostly the same thing.

Clark growled irritably, and punched at his pillow, rolling onto his stomach. “I’m up,” he muttered. “Yeesh, alright, I’m up.”

The alarm tapered off, almost obnoxiously. The overhead skylight was sliding open, letting the first rays of sunlight bleed slowly into the room. He could feel the warm, ambient heat on his back, golden and nourishing. The knots in his back loosened fractionally, and he sighed, slowly excavating himself from under a pile of blankets, and went to the modular little bathroom to splash some water on his face.

“Where are we, today?” he asked.

“Off the coast of Marrakesh,” Kelex replied, arriving beside him with a warm towel.

“Nice,” Clark murmured, wiping his face dry, and handing the towel back. “Any updates from the League?”

“No,” Kelex said. His modulation had gone just that little fraction softer, which, Christ. Wasn’t that damning. That even _Kelex_ thought he needed to be coddled, treated like something so fucking fragile. Jesus. “Nothing from Diana or J’onn either.”

“Well,” Clark said, shrugging. “I guess that’s the way of it, then.” Today’s excursion had, from the start, been his thing, not the League’s. It wasn’t exactly a shock, that they were uninterested. 

He headed over to the wardrobe. He’d need a change of clothes before he could eat, but breakfasts in Morocco were always nice.

Rabia Alami and her sisters ran a traditional little bakery slash restaurant from the front room of their home, a little ways off from the Djema El Fna, the delightfully named square that, in Maghrebi Arabic, meant the Assembly of the Dead.

Rabia arched an eyebrow from behind the counter when she saw Clark walk in, bowing his head so he would smack into the low-hanging lintel, and then put down her book — an ancient looking alt history sci-fi paperback about the end of one of the World Wars. Clark had read that one. It didn’t end well. — and strode off into the kitchen. There was a great deal of banging and clattering, and fifteen minutes later, she was bringing out a spread that even Ma would have admired: _eggs khlii,_ which were scrambled eggs cooked with cured meats, so that the eggs were almost fried in the fats as the lamb cooked through, soft, fresh _batbout_ bread served locally-sourced honey, argan oil and tart, green olives, harira soup and dates, and a silver pot of mint tea that had been polished to a high shine.

“Shukran, Rabia,” Clark said, pouring himself a cup of steaming, golden tea, and sitting back in the low-slung wicker chair, as the sun grew stronger, and the sky grew bright. The ceiling fan spun lazily overhead, and Clark doled out a spoonful of honey into his tea, mixing carefully. Rabia grunted her acknowledgement and retreated behind the counter, back to her novel.

 _Hades Falling,_ read the title. Clark remembered it well. It had been published, oh, _years_ ago. A lifetime ago. And he’d been there, at the start.

A call did come in from the League, while he was polishing off the last of the tea and dates. The storm wall off of Queensland had buckled. 

“Yeah, they don’t like me in Australia, much,” Clark said, even though he was already tucking some notes under the tea service, for his breakfast. There had been a brief period a little while back, when people used to refuse payment from Superman. He was glad that was over now. It had been awkward. “Not after the Incident. You know, with the Kraken? Isn’t Connor around? He can hold up a wall just as well as I can.”

“ _SUPERMAN!”_ came the infuriated roar. There was a sound like thunder over the comm, before it cut off, and Clark sighed, stepped out of the Alami house, into the sunlight, and rolled his shoulders a little, rising up into the air with gathering speed. He waited until he was at cruising altitude before he crashed through the sound barrier, threw himself halfway around the world, sound dopplering crazily in his ears. He made a pass through the Fortress to strip and change into uniform, and took off once more, not slowing down until he was somewhere over the Philippines. 

“Oh, that’s not good,” Clark muttered, when he saw the way the wall was starting to crack and fracture. 

“No kidding,” Kara muttered darkly over comms, and Clark flew in to help start warping and bending the metal struts of the wall so it would withstand the force of the tidal storm, melting the steel with laser vision and then compressing it till it force cooled and solidified. It was delicate work, orthopaedic surgery on the bones of a behemoth, but Clark and Kara had had plenty of practice at it, and they’d gotten very good. 

By the time the worst of the storm had passed, dissipating into the Pacific some eleven hours later, they had reconfigured the wall into a nightmarish fusion of globby, shining, half melted steel. 

“Jeez,” Clark muttered.

“Yeah,” she replied, smacking his shoulder lightly. “Hey, thanks for showing up,” she said, her voice trailing off as she flew away. “Wasn’t sure you’d show.”

 _‘You weren’t?’_ Clark wanted to ask her, confused, but she was gone already.

And then the Batplane soared over the wall, flipped through a clean one-eighty, and came to a hovering stop, in the air next to Clark.

“Bats!” Clark said. “When did you get here?”

“Before you,” came the familiar, artificially modulated rasp. “Someone had to oversee evac protocols.”

He grinned. “Right, of course.”

“I understand you’re coming tonight.”

“If that’s alright,” Clark said quietly.

“Yes,” came the reply, his voice doubled and strange, audible over the comms and, to Clark's superhuman hearing, through the plane's fuselage and shielding too. “Of course, Clark. You know that. Always.”

Clark smiled faintly. “Thank you.”

Batman nodded in the cockpit, once, the set of his jaw familiar and beloved. “I’ll see you then.”

Clark went up to the Watchtower for a check-in. Red Tornado was in the monitor room, and Clark stopped in to chat with him for a while. The mining colony on Triton was having some problems with atmospheric stabilization, but Red flicked a switch, and sent a message out. Apparently, there were a couple of Lanterns on shore leave at home, who were happy to zip out and lend a hand.

“And thanks,” Red said, casually. “For helping out at Queensland.”

“Of course,” Clark said, frowning.

Red cocked an eyebrow at him.

“What?” Clark demanded.

“Nothing,” came the murmured reply. “It’s nothing.”

He walked out, feeling vaguely unsettled, and almost immediately bumped into Diana.

“Clark,” she said warmly. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Yeah, that’s starting to look like the theme for the day,” he muttered, falling in step with her.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ah, never mind. Don’t listen to me.” He tried to smile at her. “Where are you headed?”

“Atlantis,” she said. They paused at the door to the restricted areas of the watchtower, as the computer completed a sixteen-level thaumaturgic, biometric and low-psi precognition scan to authorize their entry. “The storm did some damage in the South Pacific ocean bed. I just need to pick something up from the artefact room.” They entered the fourth room on the left, where relics and artefacts from past battles were housed under heavy security. 

He let her move ahead, flip through the holographic archive interface that glowed into place just beneath her fingertips. “Kelex told me you were going to Gotham, tonight.”

“Yes.”

She glanced at him briefly, from the corner of her eye, before going back to the archive listings. “So it’s a sure thing, then.”

“Yeah.” He watched her, his skin feeling a little chilled under the strange, pressurized atmospheric controls of the satellite. “I take it you disapprove.”

“It is not my place to approve or disapprove, Kal.” So they were back to Kal, now. “But I wish you would stop…. hurting yourself, like this.”

“I’m not,” he told her flatly. The urge to cross his arms rose up, and he beat it down ruthlessly. 

Diana turned fully to him, her lovely, unaltered face, the liquid, softness of her gaze, that achingly familiar mouth, that he had kissed, half a thousand times, and he wondered why a woman like her ever never the Lasso of Truth, when all she had ever needed were those eyes.

“Diana. I’m not,” he said again, but it sounded weak even to his own ears.

She stepped forward and touched his cheek. Rose to her toes, and kissed his brow, and the tenderness of it speared him in the gut, the touch, the kiss, the warmth of her. 

And for the thousandth time, faced with the truth of his clawing, empty loneliness, he thought, wretched, desperate, _Why couldn’t I have fallen in love with you?_

When he returned to the Fortress, Kon was already there, lounging out on the deck, reading. 

“Hey,” Clark called out in greeting. 

Kon raised up a hand, didn’t look back, and flipped the page. Well, the kid _had_ been raised in a barn, but that, Clark had always felt, was really no excuse. 

He went to his rooms, to get out of his uniform. Kelex took the suit, and handed him a somber, black suit. No more camouflaging cuts for him — this was a nice three-piece, silk-wool blend in a charcoal pinstripe, just a little old fashioned. He buttoned the shirt and the vest, and left off the jacket, hooking it on one finger over his shoulder, and then joined Kon out on the deck. The Fortress drifted along on its perpetual iceberg, moving along with the North Atlantic Current, headed towards the Arctic Circle. 

But Kon was quiet, unusually so. So Clark glanced at his book, that was keeping him so thoroughly occupied, and recognized the line he could read off of the top of the open page. 

_‘We had been foolish virgins in the war,’_ the book said, _‘right at the end of childhood,’_ and recognition thumped him deep in his chest. 

“You too, huh,” he muttered, and then wished he’d not spoken at all — or, at least, brought a drink with him. 

Kon did glance up then. “Hm?”

“Nothing.”

“You need to stop keeping things all repressed like that,” Kon told him, eyes sliding back to his book. He flipped the page. “It’s gonna give you indigestion. Thyroid trouble. Something.”

Clark exhaled slowly. “You’re the second person today,” he admitted, “who I’ve seen reading... that.”

Kon looked up at him again. Blue eyes, but not quite like Clark’s. Something of Luthor had crept into them after all, but instead of making him cold, it had just made Kon intelligent, instinctively charming, wry and kind and even self-deprecating, in a way Lex could never have managed to even credibly fake. 

“Well, it felt right," Kon said. "Today of all days…”

“Yeah,” Clark said. “Today of all days.”

Kon took in his new suit. “You're going, huh? Want me to come with you?”

“What, you’re not gonna tell me it’s a bad idea?”

“Oh, it’s a _tremendously_ bad idea. You're gonna have indigestion for a fucking millenium. I should beat your head in, it’s such a bad idea. But that’d make Kelex sad, and I don’t really wanna make Kelex sad.”

“You are the very soul of graciousness, sir,” Kelex said bitingly, and Kon grinned at the old robot.

“Ain’t I just.” He arched an eyebrow at Clark. “Whaddaya say? I’m sure there’s a suit or two my size in this old dump.”

“No,” Clark said. He stared out at the uninterrupted horizon, blue in every endless direction, and he could just about make out the curve of the Earth itself. “Thank you, but I have to do this myself.”

“Figures.” For a while, it was peaceful. Kon Read his book. Clark watched the ocean. And then Kon put the book aside, and stood up, joining him at the edge of the deck, where an ice shelf jutted upwards like a balustrade. “How are you doing, anyway?”

“Really?” Clark asked him. “That’s where we are, conversationally, in our relationship? ‘How you doin’?’”

Kon elbowed him lightly. “It’s a valid question. You don’t look too hot, old man.”

“I look fine.”

“Uh-huh. Look in a mirror once in a while, would you.” Kal touched his arm, squeezed. Some invisible keyfob must have been clicked a while back, because Kon’s airbike dove, riderless, out of the clear Atlantic sky, and came to a waiting stop next to him, antigrav engines humming softly. “Call me after you get home, okay?”

Clark almost smiled. “Kon. Did you come here to check on me?”

But Kon just looked at him, steadily, until Clark’s smile died, and then, before straddling his bike and driving away, very quietly, he said, “Yeah. Stop fucking worrying me, would you?”

Clark went to the bathroom. In the mirror above the sink, the face he saw was the same, untouchable, unalterable.

Unkillable.

Undying.

Unchanged.

And he looked closer, and saw, and he raised a wondering hand to his temple, at the single strand of grey there, heart pounding at the sheer impossibility of it, and his mind was hurtling back through the years, that day when Bruce had stood in the bathroom, wiped through the condensation on the mirror, and touched the grey at his own temples. Clark had been standing behind him, freshly showered, towel around his waist, watching.

Bruce had laughed, humorless. “Well,” he had said, “if that isn’t proof that it’s time to retire...”

Clark had scoffed. “Oh please. As if you couldn’t hand half the new kids their collective asses on the mats.”

Bruce had turned to him, those glacially blue eyes turning just a little warmer. “While I appreciate your faith in me—”

“It’s not faith,” Clark said irritably, “it’s basic logical inference. And besides,” he said, standing just a little behind Bruce, hooking an arm around his waist and stepping in close, so their bodies were warm and flushed together, “I like it,” he murmured, kissing his shoulder, his neck, the soft, clean-shaven line of his jaw, the silver hair at his temples.

He stole a glance at the mirror, where Bruce was watching him with a fond, tempered smile. “You like it,” he repeated, amused.

“S’hot,” he said. “Kinda gets me going.”

“Unbelievable,” Bruce said, but there was laughter glowing in his voice, and Clark hid his smile at the nape of Bruce’s neck, dark hair tickling his cheek.

What was really getting him going was Bruce in nothing but dark blue boxer briefs, in the soft, golden bathroom lighting, letting Clark crowd him up against the sink, the silk-hard heat of his body, his ass rubbing at Clark’s cock through the towel. “You should put on your glasses,” Clark said softly, hands stroking Bruce’s chest, his stomach, the slowly growing bulge of his briefs. “Just to round things out.”

Bruce smirked at him. “I am _not_ playing dress-up for you, Kent,” he said, hips grinding lazily into Clark’s palm.

“Oh, what the hell,” Clark mock-complained. “You’ll play dress-up for the rest of Gotham, but not for me?”

“The suit isn’t _dress-up_ , it’s tactical _camouflage_ , you lunatic—”

“I’m sorry, the _bat ears_ are tactical camouflage? The _cape_ is tactical camouflage? What did you need to tactically camouflage there? The shape of your ass?”

 _“Clark,”_ Bruce said, and Clark bit his ear lobe lightly.

“Seriously, if you put on the glasses, I’ll suck your cock, come on—”

“You’ll suck my cock _any time_ I want you to,” Bruce growled at him, and then Clark was being spun and pinned to the sink, Bruce’s mouth against his, trying to kiss him and then failing pretty comprehensively, because Clark was laughing too hard, too full with joy, and he cupped Bruce’s face in his hands, precious and beautiful, and kissed him over and over, gloriously, fully, uncomplicatedly happy, because he finally had this. Finally had _him._

He touched down just outside the driveway to Wayne Manor. It felt right, to walk the rest of the way.

Dusk was settling over the west, night creeping over the city with inky fingers. The air had gotten cleaner even over Gotham in recent years, and objectively, Clark knew that was a good thing. Subjectively... He missed the sunsets. Towards the end, that had been their favourite thing, lying in bed together, the French doors of the bedroom thrown wide open, warm summer air gathering all around them, and breath-taking sunsets, painted with a thousand colors, by a distant, fanciful god.

By the time he reached the small, secluded garden, there was already someone there. An old man in a wheelchair, tired, a little hunched. There was a tiny kitten curled up in his lap, purring in sleep. His eyes were closed too, but that had never fooled Clark.

“Hey, kid,” he murmured, and the ancient man blinked his blue eyes open slowly.

“Clark,” he said. “You came.”

“Of course.”

“I thought they’d’ve managed to talk you out of it.”

Clark quirked half a smile at him. “No chance of that.” 

“Well, that's something. I understand there was some trouble down south.”

“The holding wall near Queensland buckled. Stress fractures from the storm front moving south. Batman turned up. Did well, from what I understand.”

He exhaled irritably. “That boy is too damn soft.”

“Of course he is,” Clark said evenly. “We built him a kinder world.” 

And that made him smile, fond, pleased. It made him look so much like... Well.

“When you’re done,” he said then, “will you join us, back at the old house?”

Clark nodded. “Sure.”

He exhaled, satisfied, and began to turn the wheelchair around, and leave, when Clark said, “I never asked. Why didn’t you— Why didn’t you ever use the Lazarus Pits?”

The man in the wheelchair turned back around. He regarded Clark curiously, but his hand was on his knee, the bad one, squeezing around the numb, nerveless joint, an unconscious tic. “For the same reason he didn’t, of course,” came the even reply. He looked away from Clark, at the middle distance. “I wouldn’t be brought back right, not all the way. What would come back wouldn’t be entirely... me. And the Pits are… functionally addictive. Each time I would use their resurrective powers, I would change, just a little, bit by bit, until finally, I became the thing I had once hunted.” He looked back at Clark. “I didn’t want that for myself. He wouldn’t have wanted it for me. 

“He never wanted it for himself.”

“Yeah,” Clark said roughly. Ashamed. He looked down, eyes prickling until he squeezed them shut. “Of course.”

“Clark,” he said, that jarring, terrible gentleness in his voice, “at the end, there was nothing you could have done. At the end, you made him happy. Happier than I had seen him in years, when none of us didn’t know what to do, how to cope. Dick ran away, Jason turned to violence, I— I wrote my idiot book. We all abandoned him, when he needed us most. You didn’t, and I’ve— I’ve always been so—”

“Don’t,” Clark said harshly, the ugliness of _gratitude,_ for _that_ of all things turning his mouth acrid with bitterness. “Please don’t. Do you think there was anywhere else I would rather have been? Anywhere else in the universe I _could_ have been?”

“Nevertheless,” he said. Well, no one could say Damian Wayne hadn’t been the bravest of them all. “There was nothing more you could have done.”

“I don’t know why people say that. That doesn’t make it better.”

Damian chuckled his creaky, raspy old-man chuckle, and Clark smiled back, helpless, feeling like he was peeling away the years, seeing that tiny, serious twelve-year old’s face crack into a wondering laugh the first time he met Krypto. Such strangers, time made of each of us.

“Well,” Damian said crisply, “I cannot say I disagree with you.” He let a beat rest, and added, once more, “Take your time, but come to the house, afterwards, would you? It’s not good for a soul, to hold onto so much grief all alone.”

 _‘And my grief could fill oceans, could drown continents, could light novas into the heart of this world,’_ Damian had written in a book a hundred years ago to the day, while his father lay dying of small-cell lung cancer in the room down the hall, and the words had seared themselves into his mind’s eye forever.

But this Damian was at peace. This Damian had learned to laugh, while Clark had forgotten how.

So he put on a sardonic little smirk, and said, “And misery loves company?”

Damian grinned, sudden, blinding. “Indeed,” he agreed merrily, eyes twinkling. The wheelchair turned, and rolled up the garden path and around the bend of the wall, far and away.  
  
Clark turned around. Knelt. Let the soft, dewy, Spanish grass brush his palm. The marble headstone was a little wet, gleaming in the dying light. _Rage, rage,_ he thought, and smiled anyway.

“Hey Bruce,” he said to the headstone. “It’s been a while, sweetheart. I miss you.”

*

**Author's Note:**

> um, okay. thanks for reading.  
> if you liked it, you should really consider validating me with kudos ._.  
> for more upsetti confetti content, find me on tumblr @pasdecoeur


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